


i need no map of stars (The Force Will Guide Me Home)

by the_elegant_hedgehog



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22318642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_elegant_hedgehog/pseuds/the_elegant_hedgehog
Summary: Leia Organa and Han Solo have more than one child. They lost both of them a long time ago.
Kudos: 2





	i need no map of stars (The Force Will Guide Me Home)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this somewhere between TFA and TLJ, posted it on Tumblr and then promptly forgot about it until recently. 
> 
> Also it's dumb that TLJ has by far the best male to female ratio in any of the Star Wars movies and there's still minimal interaction between female characters.

Leia Organa and Han Solo have more than one child.

They lost both of them a long time ago.

\---------------------------------

Shmi Organa hasn’t been home in almost a decade, since she turned eighteen and jumped on the first ship away from Chandrila she could find.

It wasn’t because she hated her parents or resented them for what happened to Ben or felt oppressed by her life of leisure or anything.

Shmi left because she was the granddaughter of the man who enslaved an entire galaxy, the daughter of two of the leaders that set them all free, and the sister of the boy who had resurrected the Sith and the Dark Side of the Force.

She wasn’t sure if people expected her to join her brother in his quest to destroy the galaxy or her parent’s in their efforts to save it, but either way, she was sick of the whispers that followed her whenever she was in public.

Her mother always said Shmi reminded her of a quieter version of Han. So Shmi did what he had always done before he met her mother: she packed her things late at night and ran to the other side of the galaxy.

She dyed her long hair silver and called herself Ami, and became a personal assistant to a rich woman in the Eedoq system for a year. She jumped from planet to planet in the Outer Rim, always changing her name and appearance, always picking up odd jobs here and there.

She’s blue-haired Vicky when she joins a smuggling crew, and realizes this is the path she was destined for. She was never as Force sensitive as Ben or Luke or even her mother, but she is in tune enough with the Universe to be an amazing pilot. She later learns that she can vaguely sense when a run is going to turn sour, which ships are really part of the New Republic checking for forbidden goods and the right permits, and when she should jump into hyper drive to get away.

She’s good at smuggling, and even though it’s in her blood, she still feels like it’s her own. She grew up being told her skill as a pilot was Han Solo’s, that her strategies were Leia Organa’s, that her calmness was Luke’s. She didn’t even realize how much she resented how nothing she was truly belonged to her until years after she left home.

When she recognizes the feeling as resentment, she almost understands why Ben became Kylo Ren: he was even less his own person than she had been before she left.

She still thinks Kylo Ren was a stupid name choice for him, but she doubts he’d view “Jade Cal’aski” as any better.

Once, before she left Chandrila and just after Ben destroyed Luke’s Jedi temple, Shmi was asked by a particularly persistent reporter, “Whose legacy are you going to follow? Darth Vader and your brother’s or your parents?”

She didn’t know how to answer it back then. She knew she should say she sided with the New Republic, but couldn’t quite bring herself to denounce her brother.

So she’d said nothing, instead shoving past the wanna-be journalist and fleeing to her favorite hiding spot in the shipyard.

She now has an answer for him: she doesn’t care if the galaxy burns or not, she always finds a way to survive.

\-----------------------------------------------

Jade Cal’aski is a good smuggler, and good smugglers don’t care about anything except money and the job.

It’s too bad that Shmi Organa still cares about her family.

\-----------------------------------------------

She’s been Jade Cal’aski for so long that she barely reacts to the name Organa any more. But over the past five years, the name Organa has become more and more common and more often than not, it’s followed by talk of a new Resistance fighting against the First Order.

Part of Shmi still smarts that Leia and Ben were always so similar, making her feel like an outsider. She’d felt the same waves of rage coming from both of them. They’d both been so strong in character that Shmi could barely stand in the same room as them without feeling like less than a shadow of a person.

And they and Uncle Luke were all so connected to the Force that she couldn’t help but feel left out of some greater connection than that bond between mother and child.

But Shmi still loves her parents and when she hears that Han Solo is back in business, Shmi’s heart silently aches for her mother, now fighting alone without either her brother or her husband against her son.

Jade just thinks of the additional competition and tells herself she doesn’t care what happens as long as she can find jobs to bring in money.

But ultimately, Jade Cal’aski is just a persona made by a girl desperate for a life of her own. And Skywalkers may be good at lying to themselves, but Shmi has always been just enough different from her family to feel left out.

She hears about the plans for the Star Killer Base and for the first time since Ben was sent to train with Uncle Luke, she purposefully remembers the few Force-related lessons her uncle had given her as a child. Jade may not care if her brother commits genocide, but Shmi does. And she can’t lie to herself

In the middle of a solo smuggling run, she returns to her bunk and tries to mediate. She can’t clear her mind any better than she could as a four-year old girl, and in frustration she stomps back to the cockpit.

There, sitting and staring out at the stars that are blurring past her, she thinks she understands why Ben would always complain about “Master” Luke’s teachings. Ben had always been so big and loud, and if the much quieter Shmi couldn’t slip into meditation, she imagines he had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming.

Thinking of her brother always brought about a low, bitter pang of resentment. She lets the feeling wash over her, hears the unverbalized “he’s better and stronger than you” that she always heard whenever anyone compared them.

The feeling comes and goes. She remembers playing with her older brother in the Millennial Falcon, docked for repairs. She remembers playing the Darth Vader to his Luke Skywalker, always mindful not to do it in front of their parents or uncle who all looked on so disapprovingly when they did. She remembers watching amazed as he preformed tricks using the Force: levitating her toys, softly tugging on her hair from across the room, or fetching her favorite foods off the highest shelf of the pantry.

Back in her ship, Shmi is consciously aware of how at peace she is remembering the past. She is aware of her ship around her and of the stars streaking past. She feels them somewhere deep inside of herself, stretching around her and showing her the wide and wondrous world before her.

She drops her ship out of hyper speed, and it’s only once she has that she realizes she hasn’t moved her hands from her lap.

She smiles to herself.

She might not be her brother or her mother or her uncle. She might never be powerful enough to be a Jedi or a Sith. But she can be more than just Jade Cal’aski.

She can be Shmi Organa and she can save her brother.

\---------------------------------------

Ben was named after their mother’s only hope.

Shmi was named after a woman who knew patience.

\---------------------------------------

Shmi continues to smuggle and she continues to meditate. It’s easiest when she can look up and see the stars, and even easier still when she’s sitting in her ship.

After five years, it is as much a part of her as a Jedi’s light saber is a part of them, and she can feel the Force flow through her and it without much effort now.

She’s still not nearly as powerful as Ben had been even as a child, but she’s pleased with her own progress and feels more confident every time she uses the Force.

And then she hears that the First Order is destroying every ship they come across in her quadrant. She is hurrying to leave the area with her shipment when she spots the Star Destroyer.

Shmi loves her little ship, just large enough to smuggle a decently sized shipment but small enough for her to man by herself most of the time, but it’s no match in speed for a Star Destroyer.

If she runs, they’ll capture her. If she turns off the power, there’s no life support for her or the rather large shipment of specialized, temperature-sensitive algae. Even if she survives, her shipment won’t and if the Kanjiklub _Gang_ comes after her for a failed run she’s dead anyways. Her only hope is to pray the Star Destroyer doesn’t notice her or her small ship.

She tries to push aside the terror that quickly overtakes her- afterall, she’s heard the horror stories about what the First Order does to those they perceive as roaches and she has no hope that she’ll be spared because she is Ben’s sister.

She can’t stop the fear from setting in, can’t calm herself enough to meditate and try to do something, anything with the Force that may help her escape.

Her terror is deep and primal, and it reminds her of her brother. Just before he was sent to their uncle for formal training, Ben had destroyed their shared room in his anger. She didn’t know what had caused the episode, but the fear she had felt had driven her to slip away from the Organas’ apartment. She’d hidden in the shipyard until late at night, when her father had come to find her.

When she’d returned, their mother had been packing what was left of Ben’s things and her brother was nowhere to be found. She’d spent the night crying into her pillow. None of her things had been destroyed, only Ben’s, but he was still gone. She hadn’t seen him in person since, only receiving frequent messages and the occasional holo from him.

She hated that memory: the terror and despair that she felt made her feel weak and small, and she hated feeling pathetic or out of control.

The memory and the emotions it brings up shift something inside her, and she feels an answering shift in the Force. Her ship beeps at her as the First Order’s scanners and lights pass over the ship, and she holds her breath waiting for the tractor beam that spells her doom.

It never comes.

The Star Destroyer passes overhead, and Shmi hesitantly starts moving forward. When they don’t notice her ship, she makes the jump to hyperspeed and travels to the nearest quadrant not occupied by the First Order.

She doesn’t remember to breathe until she nearly passes out.

She arrives at her destination in one piece- and without a Star Destroyer following her- only to be nearly hit by a freighter ship. She dodges out of the way as fast as her ship is able and lands on the planet before her luck runs out and anything else can happen.

She disembarks on the planet by a crowded marketplace and is surprised that no one seems to have noticed her ship. An alien life form even manages to run face first into the landing gear.

She helps him back to his feet, asking in a voice horse from nonuse. “Are you alright? You just ran into my ship.”

It jumps up and just nods vaguely in her direction.

It takes Shmi the better part of an hour to realize that these aliens aren’t spectacularly rude, but rather that both she and her ship seem to be unnoticeable.

She remembers the shift inside of herself and in the Force earlier, and turning her focus inward, examines it. She prods it gently, before deliberately thinking the danger has passed and she wishes to be visible again.

Twenty minutes of focused meditation later, an alien life form standing next to her ship suddenly squawks and jumps as he notices the ship looming above him.

It takes a few more close counters with the First Order and some rather irate competition for her to fully understand her new trick, but she eventually masters it.

She only uses it when she needs to: gifts from the Force usually come with their own repercussions and this one leaves her with migraines and hands shaking too hard to pilot.

Despite the pain that accompanies her new power, Shmi is happy for it. She views it as the Force telling her she’s on the right path.

It’s not time for her to save Ben, but Shmi can use the time to grow in strength.

She can be patient. She will be strong.

She has faith.

\--------------

Kylo Ren doesn’t have a sister.

Ben Organa does.

\--------------

Shmi waits and bides her time. She makes her smuggling runs, always being so careful to avoid Han Solo’s customers and any rumors of the Resistance. She’s not doing this for her parents or the safety of the Republic.

She’s doing this for a reason she’s not sure even she completely understands. She knows it’s partly because she loves her brother more than she hates him, because she misses the young, happy, carefree boy he used to be.

She objectively knows she has to save him because no one else will think to.

She knows it’s possible because she knows him.

She knows Ben in her bones and her heart and in the Force, just as she knows her ship and the stars.

Shmi knows Ben, knows him despite not understanding the complicated tangle of memories and emotions that surround him in her mind.

When she hears that the Star Killer Base is completed, she buys one of the old medical droids from a reliable dealer. She fixes its old circuits and repairs its programming.

When she hears that the First Order destroyed Chandrila, she takes a moment to mourn her lost world. It hasn’t been home since before her parents abandoned it, hasn’t really been home since long before she boarded a ship and left what was left of her family behind. It stopped being home some time between Ben leaving and the first time she consciously realized that she could never be her own person as long as she was Shmi Organa.

But it was where she grew up. She mourns the planet and it’s now dead people, but she mostly mourns her memories of her home world. She mourns the shipyard where she and Ben would play, the small nocks and crannies where she would hide, the apartment where they were a real family for a short while. She mourns her simple life as a smuggler, mourns the freedom she is about to trade for family.

The moment ends, and she turns on her ship and heads back to the stars. The Force is calling to her now, saying it’s finally time. She has no coordinates to tell the computer to travel to, but she sits in the cockpit and feels the stars as they tell her where to go.

She finds the Star Killer Base and the Force continues to pull her towards her brother. He is marked with a bright point in her chest, straining forward as she makes her ship unnoticeable and lands on the planet’s surface just outside of the Base’s main gates.

She follows the urge into the Base, easily sneaking in behind some Storm Troopers finishing up a patrol.

She doesn’t really notice the cold, doesn’t notice how many troops there are, doesn’t notice how impossible this all is.

She finds Ben destroying something with a red light saber. She watches from outside the doorway as two Storm Troopers quickly turn and walk out of the hallway. Her brother seems to have developed a reputation for his rage, and Shmi sighs heavily.

The part of her mind that still thinks like Jade dryly remarks how this will make things easier. She steps into the room, picks up part of the chair’s arm, grabs her brother’s cloak, and pulls it sharply downward. Already unbalanced from swinging his light saber around like a maniac, Ben falls.

His eyes meet hers, widening in recognition even as his arm comes up to push her off him. He moves too slowly however, and she’s already hit him over the head with the chair part, knocking him unconscious.

She takes a second to ensure that she is still cloaked by the Force, before trying to figure out how to get her brother back to her ship.

It’s almost laughably easy. The hallway is empty, and with the Force it’s no trouble to find a cart to move him with.

It takes effort, but she manages to lift her brother up onto the wheeled contraption. At some point in the past lifetime, he’s grown into his over-large, almost clownish feet. She takes some small satisfaction in pilling his entire 6ft3 frame on top of the cart. Sith Lords, after all, shouldn’t look like passed-out gangly teenagers.

It takes time, but she manages to roll her brother back to her ship without being noticed by anyone. She manages to roll the cart onto her ship, hands her brother over to the medical bot with instructions to keep him unconscious and takes off.

They leave the Base still working and whole, but the Force reassures Shmi that that is a mission for someone else.

She’s done for now.

\------------------------------------

No matter what happened, Leia Organa always held onto hope.

Sometimes it’s very nice to be proven right.

\------------------------------------

Exhausted and ready to collapse, Shmi isn’t fully aware of how she arrived at D’Qar or really what she’s doing there.

She manages to stumble out of her ship, only to find herself outside what she presumes to be the Resistance Base due to the very familiar symbols of the Rebel Alliance everywhere.

She sighs in relief, before de-cloaking herself and her ship.

Around her, at least twenty Resistance fighters jump and shout loudly. She finds a blaster pointed at her. She snorts and tells the man, “Put that thing away before you hurt yourself with it. ”

They demand to know who she is and how she found them. Tired and overwhelmed, she snaps and tells them “I’m Leia Organa’s daughter. Let me see my mother.”

The fighters exchange unsure glances. “We’ve never seen you before.”

Later she’ll blame exhaustion, but she just rolls her eyes and pushes past them. They trot behind her, blasters half-heartedly trained on her, whispering to each other.

Shmi arrives at the command tent and her eyes immediately sought out her mother, only to find that the General was already staring at her.

“Shmi,” Leia barely whispers her name, but her daughter hears her regardless.

“Mom.” Shmi’s voice isn’t much louder, and she is forced to clear her throat to clear the unexpected tears. “I’ve got him mom. I’ve got Ben.”

If her mother was anyone other than Leia Organa, Shmi would expect tears or shock. Instead, she just smiles and orders a communications specialist to open a channel to her husband’s radio.

“Shmi’s home Han,” she tells him, never taking her eyes off of her daughter, “and she’s got Ben.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, before a gruff voice speaks. “Well damn, she’s definitely our kid.”

For once Shmi doesn’t mind the comparison. She stands by her mother and makes herself useful in whatever capacity is needed around the command center.

They watch together as the Star Killer Base is destroyed and the Millennial Falcon and the X-Wings head back to the Resistance Base.

There’s cheering and whooping all around them, and Leia presses a kiss to her daughter’s forehead.

“I knew I was right to have hope,” Leia tells her, arm still wrapped around her daughter’s waist, both turning to watch the festivities.

Shmi remembers her father smiling and telling her, “Never bet against your mother, that woman is always right.” She remembers Luke telling her that even if she has nothing but hope, she’ll be okay in the end.

She remembers Ben looking at her with such pride and joy and childish excitement, “I’ll be a Jedi, Shmi! And you’ll be a pilot and we’ll have awesome adventures together!” She remembers the angry, lost man currently unconscious in her ship.

They still need hope: hope that they can save Ben, hope that they can stop the First Order, hope that maybe this time they can create a government that doesn’t breed corruption or hatred.

But they are Skywalkers and Organas, hope is something in their blood and they’ve got a pretty good start to saving the galaxy.

Shmi looks at her mother, and does not mention all the things they still must fix and conquer before they are done.

Instead she looks back out at the people around her, each one a beacon of the future so full of hope and life that Shmi finds herself at a loss, blinking back tears.

She squeezes her mother’s side. “I’m glad you did.”

**Author's Note:**

> TBH I think we should bring back the sort of self-indulgent "throw in a original female character who may or may not be a self-insert" bc 1) it's not like there are a lot of female characters in these movies anyways and 2) it's just plain fun
> 
> Also now that the sequel trilogy has ended in A Way I Don't Like, I may re-write them with Shmi in it. What I think could happen next: Rey still goes off to Anch-Io to get Luke with Chewie; Ben/Kylo Ren is kept in a coma and still develops a force bond with Rey; Leia isn't blown up so Holdo's plans get communicated marginally better; and Shmi probably goes along with Finn and Rose in their efforts to disable to tracker on the ships. 
> 
> I haven't seen RotS, but I like to think of Ben as being very clearly Leia's kid- he's a bit of a snarky bastard, full of anger, ready to take charge in a situation, and an excellent shot. Shmi is a bit more like Han- she's got a heart of gold under that self-serving exterior, she's also a bit of a bastard, and she inherited all of Han's piloting and mechanical skills. Half the reason I want to write out the rest of the trilogy is that Shmi, Rose, and Rey would def all be best buddies and would spend so much time dicking around in engineering.


End file.
